XPLAN tech tips: the 2026 edition

Editor's note (draft for review). This round-up refreshes your most-read tech-tip posts. Before publishing, the team should add their current favourite tips (sections marked [ADD]) and confirm that each linked original still reflects current XPLAN behaviour.

The posts practices keep coming back to on this site aren't the strategic ones. They're the practical ones: shortcuts, templates, the small configuration changes that save ten minutes a day for every person in the office. It's been a while since we added to that collection, so here are ten XPLAN habits that still pay for themselves, refreshed for 2026.

Learn the shortcuts properly

The fastest XPLAN users we know rarely touch the mouse for routine navigation. Client search, switching between entities, jumping to a specific screen: all keyboard. If your team hasn't looked at this since onboarding, it's the single highest-return ten minutes of training you can run. Start with our XPLAN shortcuts posts.

Set up your email templates once, then stop retyping

Every practice sends the same dozen emails hundreds of times a year: meeting confirmations, document requests, review reminders. Built as XPLAN email templates with merge fields, they're one click and always consistent. Built from memory, they're five minutes each and never quite the same twice. Our best-practice guide to XPLAN email templates still applies.

Make the client search screen work for you

Icons in the client search, the right columns showing, the right default filters. Small changes that remove a step from the most-used screen in the system. See adding icons to your XPLAN client search and optimising screen real estate.

Put a data-feed health routine in the calendar

Data feeds fail quietly. A weekly ten-minute check (which feeds updated, which didn't, what's been stale for more than a few days) catches problems before an adviser finds them in a client meeting. Our data feed health ideas post has the checklist; the only update for 2026 is to make it a recurring task that's owned by someone.

Use Xmerge for anything you produce more than twice

If a document, report or letter is produced from client data more than a couple of times, it should be an Xmerge template, not a copy-and-edit job. The learning curve is real but short, and it's where most of the production-time savings in a practice actually live. Start with our introduction to Xmerge; the date formatting guide answers the most common first question.

Keep advice defaults current

Practice and adviser defaults (fee settings, modelling assumptions, standard implementation steps) take double handling out of every document. They also drift. A quarterly review of defaults against what the practice actually does is a small job that removes a surprising amount of rework.

Use threads and tasks, not email, for advice workflow

If the status of an SOA lives in someone's inbox, the practice can't see it. Threads and tasks in XPLAN make advice production visible: who has it, what's next, what's overdue. Practices that move workflow into the system stop asking "where's the Smith SOA up to?" in the Monday meeting.

Go paperless, and mean it

eForms for fact finds and client updates, digital signing, documents stored against the client record. The tools have been there for years; the gain is in actually retiring the paper process rather than running both. See streamlining your advice with eforms and going paperless in advice.

[ADD] The team's current favourite

Space for a tip the consulting team is using right now, ideally something that's changed in XPLAN recently.

[ADD] One from a client

Space for a tip a practice showed us. These are often the best ones.

The habit behind the habits

Every tip above is a small example of one principle: configure the system for how the practice actually works, rather than adapting the practice to the system's defaults. Done consistently, that principle is worth far more than any single shortcut. It's the difference between XPLAN as a cost and XPLAN as an asset.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes on how your site is configured, a free Advice Tech Health Check is thirty minutes with someone who does this every day.